Standardization

When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age, The journalist with his marketable woes Fills up once more the inevitable page Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose; Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop With horror at the house not made with hands And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup Another pure theosophist demands Rebirth in other, less industrial stars Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone And films and sleek miraculous motor cars And celluloid and rubber are unknown; When from his vegetable Sunday School Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool About the "Standardization of the Race"; I see, stooping among her orchard trees, The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in, Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees, Pause and I see her grave malicious grin. For there is no manufacturer competes With her in the mass production of shapes and things. Over and over she gathers and repeats The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings. She does not tire of the pattern of a rose. Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise. She cannot recall how long ago she chose The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes, Love, which still pours into its ancient mould The lashing seed that grows to a man again, From whom by the same processes unfold Unending generations of living men. She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains. Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains, His guilt merely repeats Original Sin. And beauty standing motionless before Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile, A long queue in an unknown corridor, Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.